Today was never good enough for Tony Stark. Yesterday was worse and time spent was time wasted. Particularly when he was presented with a problem that refused to be solved, and this business with the burst of white energy that blinded the world -- that the Avengers from another corner of the multiverse were calling the first sign of the Apocalypse didn't exactly make him feel like he could shave off time for sleeping, eating or checking in the more normal, stable corners of his life.
And he missed Pepper. He'd carved out the Avengers and expanded on Nick Fury's original Avengers Initiative because they had the players, they had resources with the refugees and they had numbers that Tony felt would let him take time off so he could focus on what he wanted to do. In a way, building the Avengers was a way of replacing all the suits that he'd destroyed. It was putting people, talented, brilliant minds with talent and experience to work instead of treating every crisis and every job like he had to do it himself. Honestly, building the Avengers had been an exercise in trusting others and he wasn't sure yet if he'd succeeded because the group wasn't running as smoothly or self-reliantly as he had hoped.
Some of that, he reasoned, was because SHIELD had been unceremoniously dismantled, leaving it's burning pieces in Stark's lap. Some of it was just because Steve Rogers wasn't quite as dependable a co-parent as he'd hoped he would be when they set out. But Rogers had his own problems with HYDRA, with Bucky, and with setting up shop a world away. And as sympathetic as Stark could be, It didn't help Tony any that Rogers wasn't around.
So many problems without solutions. But one problem he could solve, immediately and efficiently, was bringing Bruce Banner a toasted bagel with cream cheese. He thought it was funny, really, when he'd read the text. Mostly because Tony's people had people to run these kinds of errands for them. But Stark when himself to fetch the bagel before taking the elevator up to his lab. Brown bag containing the snack in one hand and already-almost-finished-but-just-purchased coffee in the other, Tony waltz over to Bruce's work desk, holding up the bag as proof he'd gotten Banner's text.